From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The definition of an artist is wide-ranging and covers a broad spectrum of activities to do with creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only. The term is often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers (less often for actors). "Artiste" (the French for artist) is a variant used in English only in this context. Use of the term to describe writers, for example, is certainly valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts like criticism.

History of the term

Although the Greek word "techně" is often mistranslated as "art," it actually implies mastery of any sort of craft. The Latin-derived form of the word is "tecnicus", from which the English words technique, technology, technical are derived.

In Greek culture each of the nine Muses oversaw a different field of human creation:

No muse was identified with the visual arts of painting and sculpture. In ancient Greece sculptors and painters were held in low regard, somewhere between freemen and slaves, their work regarded as mere manual labour.[1]

The word art is derived from the Latin "ars", which, although literally defined means, "skill method" or "technique", holds a connotation of beauty.

During the Middle Ages the word artist already existed in some countries such as Italy, but the meaning was something resembling craftsman, while the word artesan was still unknown. An artist was someone able to do a work better than others, so the skilled excellency was underlined, rather than the activity field. In this period some "artisanal" products (such as textiles) were much more precious and expensive than paintings or sculptures.

The first division into major and minor arts dates back to Leon Battista Alberti's works (De re aedificatoria, De statua, De pictura), focusing the importance of intellectual skills of the artist rather than the manual skills (even if in other forms of art there was a project behind).[2]

With the Academies in Europe (second half of XVI century) the gap between fine and applied arts was definitely set.

Many contemporary definitions of "artist" and "art" are highly contingent on culture, resisting aesthetic prescription, in much the same way that the features constituting beauty and the beautiful, cannot be standardized easily without corruption into kitsch.

The present day concept of an 'artist'

Artist is a descriptive term applied to a person who engages in an activity deemed to be an art. An artist also may be defined unofficially, as, "a person who expresses themselves through a medium". The word also is used in a qualitative sense of, a person creative in, innovative in, or adept at, an artistic practice.

Most artists are surrealists. ... always dreaming something and
then they paint it. ~ Dong Kingman

Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity — reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel — Art. ~ Herman Melville

Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on
death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art
resembles and continues the Revelation of St John. ~ Boris
Pasternak

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would
mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place
in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible
than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of
which, while ours passes away, endures. ~ Rainer Maria
Rilke

Can someone eat the fruit that comes from the tree of action that
grows from the seeds of your mind?. ~ Eugene J. Martin

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited. ~ William
Saroyan

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does
not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. ~ Oscar Wilde

Art is the process or product of
deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses
or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities,
creations, and modes of expression, including music and literature.
The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as
aesthetics.

Any great work of art ... revives and readapts time and space,
and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you
an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in
and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think
that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have
been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more
intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our
misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw
material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Jorge
Luis Borges, in Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including
a Selection of Poems : Interviews by Roberto Alifano,
1981–1983 (1984)

Art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is
concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the
other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the
artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the
future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in
the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be but is not,
have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not
the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future
must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is
normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not,
art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic
vision.

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized
writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any
and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative
expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the
individuality of others to those others. In participating in the
work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to
know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The
fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The
free individuality which is the source of art is also the final
source of creative development in time.

...the significant problems and issues of life and philosophy
concern the rate and mode of the conjunction of the precarious and
the assured, the incomplete and the finished, the repetitious and
the varying, the safe and sane and the hazardous. ...these traits,
and the modes and tempos of their interaction with each other, are
fundamental features of natural existence. The experience of their
various consequences, according as they are relatively isolated,
unhappily or happily combined, is evidence that wisdom, and hence
the love of wisdom which is philosophy, is concerned with choice
and administration of their proportioned union. Structure and
process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and
flux, one and many, continuity and discreetness, order and
progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and
innovation, rational will and impelling desires, proof and
discovery, the actual and the possible, are names given to various
phases of their conjunction, and the issue of living depends upon
the art with which these things are adjusted to each other.

John Dewey,
"Existence as Precarious and as Stable" in Experience and
Nature (1925)

I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And
I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which
makes that lie true... what that world must be like, and what would
have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

One thing, however, did become clear to him [Goldmund] – why so
many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were
almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable
beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal
works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were
deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the
highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential
thing – mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art
had in common: mystery.

While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime
are today suspect I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge
to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.

Ian Hornak, Cover Magazine (1994)

My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every
detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic,
dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that
mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque
shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which
is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences
at very special moments.

The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for
life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a
source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another,
to turn up in his product.

The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by
artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great
technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by
technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great
artist.

Alex Gross, East Village Other (1968)

[It] is that rare impressionist painting where people don't
judge the light, but rather are judged by it.

The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he
gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though
he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and
pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant
little water color you have there.'

Russell Lynes in Snobs (1950)

The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance,
his head cocked slightly to one side. ... After a long period of
gazing (during which he may occasionally squint his eyes), he will
approach to within a few inches of the picture and examine the
brushwork; he will then return to his former distant position, give
the picture another glance and walk away.

Russell Lynes in Snobs (1950)

If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore
abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we
call reality springs.

...science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds
irresistibly towards its limits where its optimism, concealed in
the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the
circle of science has an infinite number of points...noble and
gifted men...reach...inevitably, such boundary points on the
periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When
they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and
finally bites its own tail-suddenly the new form of insight breaks
through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a
protection and a remedy.

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one
would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking
place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more
inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious
existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

William
Saroyan, as quoted by William Bolcolm in "The End of the
Mannerist Century" (2004), The Pleasure of Modernist
Music, Ashby, Arved, ed. ISBN 1580461433

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

William
Saroyan Recalled at his Broadway memorial service, The New
York Times (31 Oct 83)

It holds up in one object or one surface, in one bright,
luminous and concentrated thing — whether a beer can or a flag —
all the dispersed elements that go to make up our lives.

Robert C. Scull on his collection of pop and minimal art,
Time (21 February 1964)

I'd rather use art to climb than anything else.

Robert C Scull when asked if his purchases were for investment
or social climbing, recalled on his death (1 January 86)

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment
near the state university, where I discovered both crystal
methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are
dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy
entire civilizations.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one
consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to
others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected
by these feelings, also experience them.

In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of
all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it
as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this
way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of
effective communication between people.

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is
precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the
man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with
no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered
expression of his nature and our destinies.

I had recourse to a dictionary of synonyms, and there I found
"deformed" in the company with such terms as "ugly, foul,
loathsome, obscene," and read moreover that "to deform is to make
something ugly in form."

The emotional states which a painter or other artist feels
irresistibly forced to express are those most intimate states of
mind and soul from which may be struck the spark or revelation,
kindling a light that shows things in their deepest, most
universal, and perhaps even eternal reality; this light we may call
the light of poetry.

If you want to know what true art is: Go outside on a clear
night, wait until it gets very, very dark, then look up! You will
see no rules of composition, no evidence of superior technique.
Yet, you will be staring into the very face of pure, unadulterated
beauty and wonder. That is the unattainable Ideal for which I must
constantly strive.

It is not about which artist is more skilled than which other
artist. It is about creating what is in you to create. A lack of
confidence in oneself is like a thief, It steals from the world
that which might be worthy.

The entire 'my art is better than your art' thing really gets
under my skin. The fact of the matter is: Your art IS better than
my art... at being what it is. So what? It just so happens that my
art is better than your art, at being what it is.

Whats the difference between art and pornography... a
government grant!

Peter Griffin, Family Guy

artists' imagination is bound to simplicity and as a rule is in
conflict with common sense.

Kaloust Guedel

Most Christians' view of evangelism are along the same lines of
the pro da campaigns of Nazi Germany. They have this 'us against
them' concept, and they destroy art. They want to make films and
music that make their philosophical position look good, which is
not the same as art.

Frank Hart, leader for Atomic Opera

Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath
of folly.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and
makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with
free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize
its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a
will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher
sense — he is "collective man" — one who carries and shapes the
unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.

Art should be more then just brush stokes on canvas showing a
precise and literal duplication of an event. Art is for more then
that. True art captures emotions, feelings and the energy of the
object or event that is being depicted. It goes far deeper then the
cold, flat surface of duplication.

The function of all art ... is an extension of the function of
the visual brain, to acquire knowledge; ...artists are, in a sense,
neurologists who study the capacities of the visual brain with
techniques that are unique to them.

From Wikisource

One evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an
image of The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment. And he went forth
into the world to look for bronze. For he could think only in
bronze.

But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor
anywhere in the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save
only the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth For
Ever.

Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands,
fashioned, and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved
in life. On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set
this image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of
the love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man
that endureth for ever. And in the whole world there was no other
bronze save the bronze of this image.

And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great
furnace, and gave it to the fire.

And out of the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth
For Ever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that Abideth for a
Moment.